- Winning customers beats winning products.
Open your ears and listen to your customers people.
I'm going to show you why you should be looking
for a winning customer rather than a winning product
in order to be successful with your e-commerce store.
Let's go.
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A lot of people obsess about traffic
and finding a winning product,
but seriously the most important thing you need to do
for your store is listen to your customers.
Once you understand this you'll understand business,
and you won't have any problems
growing your e-commerce store.
If you are having problems growing your e-com store
step back and take a look at exactly what you're doing.
You have your website up, you have products on your website,
but no one is buying.
Or if they are buying,
your customer acquisition costs are far too high
and you're working really hard to try and convince
your customers to buy from you.
You have a problem here.
You need to stop and listen to your customers
and find out what they really want.
Your website is probably not written
in the language of your customers.
I don't mean English, Spanish, German, languages like that.
I'm talking about the language of your niche.
Every single little group of people,
like swimmers, surfers, gardeners, rock climbers
they all have their own way of communicating
and talking amongst each other.
Have you heard gamers speak about World of Warcraft?
Some of my good friends are obsessed with the game
and when I'm around them, they speak a whole other language
that I don't even understand.
And my grandma is obsessed with gardening.
That's why I use that as an example.
And when she speaks about certain things,
it's like I'm speaking to an alien.
It's a whole other language and lingo.
Your customers can tell if you don't understand them.
This is why you can't just throw up a basic product page,
run some Facebook ads and then call it a day.
Okay. Do you need some more proof of this?
I started my e-commerce journey
by working amongst a lot of local markets.
I spent a lot of time amongst these stallholders
and seeing how they talked to their customers.
The cool thing about having a store at some local markets
is that you can talk directly to your customers.
The best store holders were those that listened
to what their customers had to say
and they would come back the next week with better products,
better signage, and better ways to serve those customers.
There's a big problem with online stores and that's that
you have a virtual wall between you and your customers.
Even if you set up a live chat on your site, like Gorgias,
it's still really hard to have that real communication
with the people on your website.
It's hard to see their thought process
as they look at your products and why they leave.
So a lot of e-com store owners will put up a website
and then just hope for the best.
And really it's a bit like playing the lottery.
You're making a website for the first time
without ever speaking to your customers.
You put it up with all your products
and you're just hoping that it hits the nail on the head.
The chance that you make the website
that speaks to their problems, understands them
and provides a solution is so hard to do
without talking to your customers.
Seriously guys,
this is why market research is so important.
The chances of doing this right the first time
without market research is almost impossible.
So guys you need to find a way to communicate
with these people, get feedback from them on your website
and your products.
You want to dive deep and find out their needs,
their wants, their frustrations, their pains.
Seriously.
Once you really understand these people you can then go away
and craft a beautiful website that speaks directly
to where they are and what they want.
And really it makes the whole process
of growing your e-com store so much easier
because you won't need to spend so much time
and money on your ads.
Because once you get this product and this website
in front of the right people,
your conversion rate is gonna be so much higher
than anybody else.
I've seen this time and time again,
with many stores, I've worked with
where they've come across my desk
and I've seen that they've done this exact thing.
They've listened to their customers
and they've crafted a product and website
that directly talks to those people.
We'll then run ads, Facebook, Google, and Bing,
and it's crazy, the ROAS, the return on ad spend
that we'll get for these websites
like seven, eight, nine 10 plus for cold traffic.
When you have this sort of setup
it just makes it so easy to scale and build this up
because all the hard work is already done.
So yeah, guys, this is the key to a successful store
and even just doing business in general.
Give the people what they want, solve their problems.
This is gonna help you for the rest of your life
with all your other business endeavors
whatever business you create.
In the e-commerce industry, in services,
in any sort of industry, finding how you can add value
to people's lives is really the key to being successful.
Okay guys.
So how do we actually do this?
I recommend finding a place in real life
like a mall, a public space, other shops
where you can go and meet these people in real life.
You can also go to a meetup about your product
in your niche.
For example, with the gardening example,
you can go to a gardening club and speak to those people
that are really passionate about gardening.
Start with somewhere in real life.
It costs nothing.
And the cool thing is you can see and experience
who you're actually talking to.
There's so much about communication
that's actually non-verbal,
just like how you're seeing me right now.
This is very different than if we were on live chat
and I'm trying to explain this to you.
The next thing is to find out
where these people hang out online.
Forums, Facebook groups, websites, YouTube channels.
Basically finding out where these people congregate online
and getting amongst them, learn from them.
Get excited about the niche.
See how I haven't even started talking about
paid advertising yet.
Yes, many times I've done paid ads to a fresh store
and it can work, but you're spending a lot of money
just to validate some assumptions.
When honestly you can save so much time and energy
by just talking to these people
and getting that stuff from the start.
Okay. So what about if you already have a store,
you're not a beginner and you have a store going
it's like I said go out and talk to your customers.
But you can do a few other things too.
First, call up or email current customers.
Yep. That's right.
This may sound a bit weird
but you can send them an email and say,
"Hey I'd love to interview you, you and find out more
about your experience with our products and our brand."
An easy way to do this is to just say,
"Hey I'll give you an Amazon gift card,
if you do this for me, just 15 minutes,
$20 Amazon gift card.
And that information will be worth so much more
than just $20.
Seriously, that 10 to 15 minutes you spend on the phone
with that customer is gonna be worth it's weight in gold.
You want to find out why did they purchase?
Why did they choose you over the competitors?
What problem are you solving?
Basically, just asking, probing and open questions
to dig deep and find out more about them,
their thought process and why they bought your products.
Another thing which is really easy
and I've mentioned this a little bit,
is getting live chat installed.
I recommend Gorgias.
We use that for all our stores
and that integrates really well with Shopify.
I'll leave a link in the description.
But you can use Gorgias to really talk to these people
and make sure when they're on your website
they have a way to communicate with you
and talk to you right away.
Another great tip is to have a phone number on your website.
This may scare some of you.
It really depends on where you're at
with that sort of thing.
But people being able to call you up and speak to them
directly on the phone is also worth so much.
It's incredible.
Something else that you can do is get heatmap software
installed on your website.
I'll leave a link to Hotjar down below in the description.
And that's a heatmap software and screen recording software
that basically records people interacting with your website
and presents it in a heatmap or a screen recording.
This is incredibly useful
for seeing how people interact with your website.
It's not the same as talking to them,
but it's pretty good.
It's looking over their shoulder
as they interact with your site.
With this YouTube channel, I'm putting out all these videos
and I'm really listening to the e-commerce store owners
and what they think.
Am I in the right direction?
Am I helping them with their stores?
And I'm constantly trying to improve,
okay, it's better if I do this, or I talk about this
because this is a big pain point that they have.
And you'll see that over time, just like with your store,
this channel is gonna morph and morph
and basically become that ultimate source of information
to help e-commerce store owners.
On top of this, it's not something that you just stop
and then, boom you've got a passive income business
and that's life,
you stick your feet up and you can just relax.
It's something that's always gonna have to be happening.
You're always going to have to be adapting your business.
It's the same, whatever business you create.
There's going to be competitors that come in
and listen to their customer.
You want to make sure
that you constantly have your ear to the ground
and listening about how you can best serve your customers.
So yeah.
Get in this mindset guys, if you're an entrepreneur
this is what you do.
You solve problems.
You help people like this.
So guys, that's it for today.
If you found this video useful, please give it a thumbs up.
And if you have any questions at all
leave them in the comments.
I'll do my best to answer every single one.
And if you want to see more tutorials just like this one
on how to grow your e-commerce store,
check out my channel and consider subscribing.
I make a lot of videos, just like this one
even technical ones where I share my screen
and show you different advertising accounts,
how to build your store, all that kind of stuff.
Thanks so much for watching guys.
And I'll see you in the next video.
Bye for now.
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